Have you wondered why the jury in the Kermit Gosnell multiple-baby-murder trial in Philadelphia is taking such a long time reaching a verdict?

This may be the real reason why:

For most of us, the death of a child is just about the most tragic event we can imagine.

The Sandy Hook massacre was so overwhelmingly gut-wrenching because the victims were mostly young children. Likewise, news reports about the Boston Marathon bombing emphasize the fact that, of the three people killed, one was an 8-year-old boy – as if to highlight the uniquely great loss of a child.

In the world of crime, one of the most incomprehensible acts is baby-murder. We’re outraged at the widespread sex-selective infanticide of newborn girls in China. And recent headlines like “Georgia boys face murder charges after cold-blooded killing of infant being strolled by mother” and “Black teens murder white baby for the fun of it” cause us to shake our heads and wonder, How could anyone possibly sink so low as to kill a baby?

Of course, appalling crimes like these have always have been a part of life in this fallen world – a world of good and evil, of decent and indecent people, where moral outrage is kindled within all good souls by the murder of the innocent.

However, parallel to this moral, rational world exists yet another world – an amoral, irrational one, constructed over several decades with great effort and cleverness. We’re talking about the realm of … well, what shall we call it? Every official label for it – “abortion,” “choice,” “women’s health,” “reproductive freedom” – is a euphemism designed to obscure a dark reality.

That reality, stated objectively, would be: the premeditated killing of human babies residing inside their mother.

In this strange parallel world, the same killing of a baby that in the real world outrages us and results in prosecution, prison and possibly execution (or lifetime confinement in a high-security psychiatric lockup for the criminally insane) is mysteriously transformed into a “medical procedure” and “constitutional right,” provided for and fiercely defended by a multi-billion-dollar industry. And funded by taxpayers.

These two worlds have collided in the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell. And when worlds collide, spectacular and utterly unexpected things sometimes occur.

News organizations get righteous – for a day or 2

As everyone now knows, Gosnell’s clinic, despite its dignified-sounding name, “Women’s Medical Society,” was actually a “house of horrors” more reminiscent of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele than a legitimate medical practice. Here’s how the grand jury summarized Gosnell’s operation:

This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths.

The grand jury’s report is horrifying not just for what it reveals about Gosnell’s crimes, but because it documents that a lot of what is now universally condemned about Gosnell’s abortion business was known throughout the Pennsylvania regulatory agencies for years – but no one lifted a finger to stop it.

The sun started to shine on all this when the case went to trial. Eyewitness testimony painted an otherworldly picture of a Nazi-like torture clinic, with one Gosnell employee saying “it would rain fetuses – fetuses and blood all over the place,” and another recalling one baby expelled alive into a toilet and observing the infant “was like swimming” and “trying to get out.”

For a “mainstream press” overwhelmingly skewed toward “abortion rights,” it was stunning (although as it turned out, very short-lived) when top news organizations from the New York Times to the Washington Post suddenly and simultaneously proclaimed their outrage over Gosnell’s abortion crimes and the lack of news coverage.

“Infant beheadings. Severed baby feet in jars. A child screaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure,” wrote liberal Democrat and Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers in an impassioned and widely read USA Today column. “Haven’t heard about these sickening accusations? It’s not your fault,” she explained:

Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell began March 18, there has been precious little coverage of the case that should be on every news show and front page. The revolting revelations of Gosnell’s former staff, who have been testifying to what they witnessed and did during late-term abortions, should shock anyone with a heart.

That’s great. But there’s just one snag in this temporary journalistic outrage (few media outlets followed through by sending a reporter to the trial) over Gosnell’s abortion crimes: Virtually everything Kermit Gosnell was accused of doing occurs routinely in other abortion clinics throughout America.

Everything. Routinely.

“The dead babies,” intoned the Atlantic’s headline. Yes, the dead babies – about 55,000,000 of them so far since Roe v. Wade, including hundreds of thousands of late-term abortions just like those babies “murdered” by Gosnell and his employees.

“The exploited women.” Sorry, but exploiting women – scaring and pressuring them, pretending to care about them so they’ll buy the abortion, withholding life-and-death medical information about both the unborn child’s development and the serious adverse physical and psychological consequences for the mother, and lying to them from start to finish – is the central operating principle of the abortion industry. Without it – if women were counseled with absolute honesty, candor and full disclosure – the number of abortions would plunge overnight. And that’s just the beginning: Abortionists’ routine exploitation of women when the “procedure” goes awry – as it often does – has resulted in death for many and permanent injury, trauma, sterility and soul-scarring heartache for countless more.

“The racism.” The left-leaning press, which somehow is more offended by racism than almost anything else in this life, complains about Gosnell’s “racist” double standard in treating poor minority women worse than he treated rich white women from the suburbs. Major reality check: The abortion industry is one of the most racist enterprises in the Western world. Margaret Sanger, founder of the nation’s No. 1 abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, was an unapologetic racist and eugenics proponent who openly advocated for preventing blacks and other “inferior races” from breeding, and famously wrote: “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

To this day, U.S. abortion clinics are set up predominately in areas with a disproportionately high black population, a fact documented repeatedly over the years. For example, when CNS News compared the location of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics with Census population statistics, it found:

In nearly two-thirds (62.5 percent) of the comparisons, the communities with a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic had a higher percentage of blacks than the state did as a whole. In Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts and Ohio, the communities containing all of the Planned Parenthood abortion clinics had much higher black populations than their respective states, while Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming – all of which have low black populations – have none of the organization’s abortion facilities.

“The numerous governmental failures.” Seriously? It’s not just the “failures” of the Pennsylvania regulatory authorities. Government at all levels, but especially at the federal level, for decades has overtly supported, enabled and protected the abortion industry in myriad ways ranging from providing taxpayer support to enacting laws prohibiting prolife demonstrators from congregating anywhere near abortion clinics (legislation widely regarded as violating the First Amendment’s right to assemble).

‘Why is everyone upset over Gosnell?’

“So,” asks Mark Crutcher, founder and president of the Denton, Texas-based pro-life organization Life Dynamics, “why is everyone so upset over Kermit Gosnell?”

Along with other prolife activist groups like Troy Newman’s Operation Rescue and Lila Rose’s Live Action, Life Dynamics has long specialized in exposing criminal abortionists.

“For years,” Crutcher told me recently, “we’ve exposed one criminal abortionist after the other. But abortion proponents always say the offender is just a ‘bad apple’ and an ‘aberration.’ But when we expose hundreds of similar offenders, every one of them is still just a ‘bad apple’ in a barrel of good apples. At what point do we realize they’re all bad apples?”

One chapter of Crutcher’s book, “Lime 5: Exploited by Choice,” details three dozen cases (and references many more) of abortionists who raped or otherwise sexually molested their “patients.” One of the abortion doctors, called a “predator in a white coat” by California’s deputy attorney general, was accused of sexually assaulting more than 160 women.

The crime scene

The collision of these two warring worlds in the Gosnell case – the one world where killing a baby is a capital crime, and the other where killing the same baby is a “woman’s fundamental right” – forces us to confront an all-important question: Where did the killing occur?

Understand, the babies Gosnell “murdered” were no older, larger, more viable, more human or more precious than other late-term babies aborted routinely over the past 40 years. It’s just that Gosnell pulled them out of their mother before he killed them. Had he done exactly the same horrendous things (like “snipping” infants’ spinal cords) while the baby was still inside the mother, many who today express horror would have regarded “the procedure” as just another late-term abortion that mother and doctor determined to be in her best interest.

How is this possible? Aside from legal restrictions imposed (but routinely ignored) by a few states, abortion in America under Roe v. Wade is legal from the moment of conception until the moment of birth if the mother’s life or health is determined to be endangered. And “health” – here’s the giant loophole – is broadly interpreted to include both physical and mental health, which means an abortionist could sign the authorization form claiming the mother risked becoming, let’s say, “depressed” if denied the “procedure” or “therapy.”

To her credit, Powers courageously confronted this now-institutionalized mass delusion: “Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb – as in a routine late-term abortion – is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.”

The existence of these two competing worlds, one based on self-evident truth and the other on monumental selfishness and denial, is easy to explain: The deception-based world of abortion is rooted in our devotion to what has become a near-sacred belief – total sexual freedom. We have determined as a modern, secular, post-Christian society that we have the absolute right to engage in sexual relations with whomever we want and whenever and wherever we want, and we repudiate the notion that we have to take responsibility for the natural result of sex – which is children. Having committed so deeply to this proposition, it matters not how barbaric and inhuman abortion is, how many gorgeous children we see with their throats cut, heads cut off, chemically burned alive, brains sucked off, or spinal cord “snipped” with scissors. We must allow for abortion on demand or our sacred right to sexual freedom ceases to exist.

This is why, as an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama opposed the “Born Alive Infant Protection Act,” designed to prevent precisely the types of crimes committed by Kermit Gosnell. If you acknowledge that what’s at stake is a baby, the entire abortion delusion unravels.

The magic line

In the deluded fantasy world of “reproductive freedom,” we say, “Think you may be pregnant? Just take the morning-after pill.” A few weeks later, “Just take RU486,” or “Just have a suction abortion. It’s not a baby.” With each passing week of gestation, however, it becomes increasingly more difficult to sustain the delusion.

Fast forward just a few weeks or months, and now – at the point of natural birth – anyone killing the same baby is, like Gosnell, regarded as a child-murderer and prosecuted as a depraved criminal.

In an attempt to reconcile these two opposing worlds, we endlessly draw magic lines – arbitrary points before which killing babies is a revered constitutional right, and after which it’s a monstrous crime. We create lots of these artificial lines – from “first trimester,” “second trimester” and “third trimester” to “heartbeat,” “20 weeks” and “viability.”

Of course, trumping all these magic lines is an even more arbitrary and irrational measure of infant humanity – namely, whether or not the parents want the child! One child has inestimable value backed by the legal protection of the state solely because the parents want and love it, while another child of identical attributes and age, but whose parents don’t want it, is considered worthless medical waste.

Is this not a form of madness?

In reality, of course, life in the womb is a wondrous continuum of growth from the moment of fertilization to the moment of birth. There is no “line” before which or after which abortion is OK.

As the Gosnell trial has proven, these two warring worlds – the world of love and life versus the world of selfishness and death – inevitably collide somewhere along this continuum. After all, putting aside Gosnell’s unsanitary clinic conditions, “racism” and other unseemly atmospherics, the only major difference between this and other abortionists was that his killing was visible – outside the mother where others could see it.

Do we really think Gosnell’s “snipping” of infant spinal cords is somehow worse than the untold numbers of other late-term abortions in today’s America? Is “snipping” more inhumane than forcibly ripping apart human babies limb from limb, or injecting Digoxin into their heart to make them have a fatal heart attack, or chemically burning them to death with intrauterine saline and other lethal chemicals, or– as in the recently outlawed intact dilation and extraction (“partial birth abortion”) procedure, pulling the living baby feet-first out of the womb and into the birth canal, except for the head, stabbing the base of the baby’s skull with surgical scissors, inserting a tube into the wound, sucking out the baby’s brain with a suction machine (causing the skull to collapse) and delivering a now-dead baby?

How on earth can we possibly have the gall to express horror at Gosnell’s abortions, but not toward the other equally abominable but legally sanctioned killings that have scarred our nation for four decades?

Maybe the Gosnell trial is just a convenient catharsis for “pro-choice” Americans – including the “mainstream media” – an opportunity to safely express their revulsion at this “bad” abortionist’s crimes without fear that it will negatively impact all those “good” abortion practices they imagine are out there?

Today’s Americans often wonder at how earlier generations could have thought slavery was OK. We say, How could they not know blacks were fully human?

Do we think we are even slightly less blind, less deluded, less steeped in denial than our slaveholding ancestors? Remember, we’re talking about 55,000,000 dead American children – more deaths every single day than the total number of people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Abortion has always been a cosmic collision waiting to happen. In the same society where we are rightly outraged at child murder, we embrace child murder.

Meanwhile, millions of prolife Americans, like the biblical Israelites under Moses’ watch, have been marching for 40 years (since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision) in the desert of societal madness, often it seems going in circles, vainly hoping that one day they will finally arrive, through some miracle, at the promised land of restored morality and reverence for life.

Perhaps the Gosnell case is serving a great purpose – of pricking and prodding the sleeping conscience of Americans, of awakening many to the horrors that they, like the clueless German populace during WWII, too long enabled by looking the other way.

By the way, in case you wondered whatever became of Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz concentration-camp doctor known for the agonizing and often-lethal “medical experiments” he performed on Jews, including countless children – here’s the rest of the story:

Like several other Nazi war criminals, Mengele found safe haven in South America, where he evaded Nazi-hunters for the rest of his life. Settling in Argentina, he practiced medicine in Buenos Aires for several years in the 1950s.

His specialty? As the New York Times reported decades later, long-secret Argentine government archives released to the public for the first time in 1992 revealed that Mengele “had a reputation as a specialist in abortions.”